Wyeast 1968 London ESB - surprisingly flocculant?

Greetings,

I made a starter yesterday for the Peace Coffee Stout kit I received from Northern Brewer. I hit about 13 degrees Plato on it or about 1.054. It's a 1400ml starter.

The yeast shipped from NB with the cold pack in about 3-3.5 days. It has a date code of 4/10/13 and swelled up just fine within about 2 hours.

I woke up this morning to find this:



And when I turn the stir plate off, it settle to this in less than ten seconds:



Am I just crazy or is this ridiculously flocculant? It smells fine yet looks really funky!

Anyone have experience with 1968 that would show me I'm not crazy?

Thanks,
Jason

I have made 2 ESB's with that yeast. I like it a lot. I have not done a starter with it before though, since I just started doing them recently.

It's normal for that strain. And for future reference, you want your starters to be about 1.035 - 1.040 to provide an optimal low stress growth environment. 1.054 is too high.

1968 drops like a brick, when I use it I rouse the yeast a bit during fermentation to keep it in suspension.

Yeah, I had quite a bit of concentration. I went from 2000ml of water and 191g of extract to 1400ml and 1.054. I think my boil on it was pretty damn high.

TheJasonT said:

Yeah, I had quite a bit of concentration. I went from 2000ml of water and 191g of extract to 1400ml and 1.054. I think my boil on it was pretty damn high.

Click to expand...

You really only need to boil for a few minutes. All you are doing is dissolving the DME and sanitizing

It was only an 11 minute boil but it was in a larger pasta pot so I had a lot of surface area. Gonna have to turn the heat down some next time.

I used it for the first times a few months ago and my experience was the same.

Fuller yeast, drops like a rock. But watch the fermentation temps. This one will go off pretty quick when it gets too warm.